


Certain Simple Joys

by Screaming_Magpie



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Gen, Rincewind has a nice day, Rincewind is a runner, Rincewind is a witch, just a few Rincewind thoughts tied together by someone who just finished the Light Fantastic, only a brief mention of Twoflower, the witches are in there though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-15 06:40:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29184900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Screaming_Magpie/pseuds/Screaming_Magpie
Summary: When you've spent most of your life running in order to get away from very nasty things that will kill you if they catch you, Rincewind reflects, there's a certain joy to doing it just for the sake of the thing.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	Certain Simple Joys

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like Rincewind would like jogging. I also feel like Rincewind is a bad wizard because he's actually a witch. I ALSO feel like Rincewind deserves to have a nice time. This may be self indulgent.

When you've spent most of your life running in order to get away from very nasty things that will kill you if they catch you, Rincewind reflects, there's a certain joy to doing it just for the sake of the thing. It's simplicity, is what it is. When you're fleeing barbarian hordes or groups of wizards forced to skip breakfast, you don't have much time to focus on the sensations of running itself. If you use up your noticing on the pleasant stretch and release of your muscles or the wind against your face, you may not have enough noticing left for something very important, such as the stretch and release of bow strings or the dagger against your face. 

He has time now, though, in the crisp Lancre morning, all yellow-lit and inviting. Lancre mornings rise misty more often than not, which Rincewind enjoys for the slowing and filtering effect the mist has on the languorous light of the disc. Now he slips into the world at an easy starting pace, a trot preparing to gather itself into a jog, and for once his mind is free of worry, of cynical commentary, free of everything except the immediacy of what he's doing. 

He catalogs in his head the things that are pleasant about running. There's the rhythm, that's a big one. It's predictable and controlled. Rincewind likes it when things are predictable. The last few years have been a bit short on predictability, and he creates it now where he can. 

Next, his breath. Cold against his lips, cold all the way down into his belly like a sip of clear water after a drought. Cold as it works its way into his bloodstream and all throughout his warming body, cold like reassurance, cold like clarity. Clean air the likes of which you only find in the countryside works its way into his mind and sets it floating, light as a falling leaf, as easy, as temporary. His legs move and his mind calms and it's nice, it's really nice, not to be afraid even a little bit. Not to worry about anything but the next step you take. 

His legs move and find the ground and rise again. Muscles. Stretch, relax, stretch, find the point at which they become pliant, flexible, and Rincewind feels briefly powerful in a way that would have been quite alien to him a few short months back. 

The sharpness of the air on his body and the gentle roll of the countryside blend softly. A patch of morning light stops to confer idly with a pocket of mist hanging low to the ground. Rincewind greets them as he passes. He runs slowly enough to savor each feeling, and to revel in the fact that his life doesn't depend on picking up the pace. 

It had been Magrat's idea, the running thing. She's full of ideas, some better than others. Her craziest one, as far as he's heard, is that he might be a witch. 

Mind you, it makes an uncomfortable amount of sense. He's got magic in him. He knows that, no matter how many times the world throws it in his face. He may be the worst wizard on the disc, but gods be damned he is a wizard. 

He'd never considered the other option. 

Anyway, it's Magrat. She brought up the running because she saw the way he evaded Granny Weatherwax's bees, and a few pinches of his (noticeably bony) leg didn't seem to dissuade her from the idea. She’d even made him a headband for it, possibly as a genuine gift or possibly out of mean-spiritedness. It is red and says Wizzard across the front. 

Rincewind is far from the athletic type, and certainly seems to embody the skeptical type. So the running had seemed like another dud, until he'd tried it. And liked it. Liked it a lot, if you must know. 

Also, he's pretty good at it, which is a strange feeling for someone who isn't good at all that many things. He's got the running, and his knack for languages, and that's about it. Both skills acquired by necessity to get him out of some tight spots, and employed down the line largely for the purpose of getting him out of further tight spots. 

And there's the ability to stay alive, he muses, vaguely registering that he has lapped the small village of Lancre and is now heading out past the meadows where Magrat likes to frolic. That one's important. It gets brushed off to the side when discussing Great Deeds and Those Who Do Them, but really, without that one fundamental skill, no Great Deeds would ever get done at all. And Rincewind can claim that talent to its fullest extent. He's got no penchant for masterminding, he doesn't lean toward the artistic, swords in his hands become so many awkward bars of metal, and magic, well. He's still working that one out, there seems to be more to it than he originally thought, the ladies of Lancre have a good many interesting things to say on the matter, some of which he even understands- but the point is, his magical ability is questionable at best. He is a poor wizard, and he's not sure that he's any kind of witch. But when it comes to Saving One's Own Sorry Skin, Rincewind is the reigning champion, no question. That's not something that ought to be underestimated. 

So he thinks to himself as he turns onto the uncobbled country road, easing into that remarkable clear headspace you reach when you've been running for a while and your muscles have realized that this is what is happening to them and they may as well quit complaining and get on with it. The mist has been slowly burning away, and now he watches as the light creeps above the last of it and sets to the task of warming the day. 

Lancre is no Ankh Morpork. Many would say that's a blessing, and if they were Morporkian, then of course, they would be absolutely correct, but if any of the country bumpkin locals dared slander the great city naturally there would be a problem. Likely the sort that ends in the serving girl complaining about having to sweep up the teeth. 

Rincewind isn't sure where he stands on the issue. Ankh Morpork is his ground, of course, his city, his smelly, deadly cesspit of a home, and he's as quick to defend it as the next lad if riled. 

But, well… 

Ankh Morpork is in his soul, that's the thing. It's the sort of home that always calls you back, when it notices you've been gone a while. He thinks of Twoflower, the way he used to talk about leaving and returning home, and decides he might understand, a little better than he used to. 

But Lancre is nice. It's nice the way places that aren't his are nice. It's nice because the mornings are misty, and the town is small and the people all know each other, and no one ever gets killed over the price of butter, and it's green and it has bees and it has witches. 

That's something else entirely. The witches. The witches with their strange strain of magic that feels a lot like plain old common sense, and maybe if Rincewind had spent a bit more time at the academy he would have laughed it off as mind games and nothing more. But the problem, the thing about common sense, is that it makes… well… sense. 

Rincewind had always considered himself a practical sort. It goes with the territory. Trees don’t talk and rocks don’t fly and the world is flat because you would fall off if it wasn’t. And the best way to survive an encounter with something deadly is to run away from it very fast. That’s logic. Rincewind’s trouble, with wizarding, had always been that he believes the world to be a fundamentally logical place. If it seems otherwise at times, that’s an error of perception, and not of the structure of things. 

The witches seem to be of a similar mind, though they dismissed this take as simplistic. “You can’t always expect the world to make sense for you,” Granny Weatherwax had sniffed. “Not without puttin’ in the work yourself.” 

“It’s like this,” Nanny Ogg had endeavored to explain, ever the go-between. “There’s an order to the world. Right?” 

“I should like to think so,” said Rincewind. Over the past few years he had been growing increasingly less certain of this. 

“Right. Only, no one said it was a good order, or a particularly well thought out one. So a lot of the time, the world can stand for some ord’rin from other sources, you know, someone to come in and tidy up and shoo the extradimensional horrors out of the metaphorical privy, as it were. And a lot of the time, the world really does make sense, and it’s folks who don’t, and they just need a bit o’ remindin’. So we reminds ’em.” 

She’d grinned, big and jovial and a bit threatening. 

This had struck a chord with Rincewind at the time. 

They had made him an offer- a very simple one. Stay. Stay, and you will learn. Maybe not witching. Maybe not magic. But something. You will learn something. 

He’d agreed as much out of the desire for some time spent in non-life-threatening situations as he had out of curiosity. 

Something had turned out to be a lot of mucking out Granny Weatherwax’s goats, a lot of tending to vegetable gardens and carrying medicines to various Lancre residents, a lot of extracting honeycomb and getting stung by bees, and, in between and about the chores, a lot of talking. 

The talk was the interesting part. First of all, there was the binary to be worked around. Granny Weatherwax, her steel gaze a crystalline window to the steel trap of her mind, had made it abundantly clear that she was against introducing a man to the trade in any way. Magrat had rolled her eyes and said something about old fashioned thinking and moving with the times. Rincewind had fidgeted uncomfortably, and Nanny Ogg had actually bothered to speak with him. 

What she found was an intelligent young man with a good resolve buried under layers of anxiety and cynicism. He had the way of thinking, she’d declared. The ability to look at a sequence of events or ideas and think, no, what if, and, moreover, based on his brief and meek account of his history, the ability to apply it. And that’s magic. Of the witchy sort. 

Having set him to work, Granny Weatherwax found the same. She kept mostly quiet about it, but he did good work and followed instructions like a champion, and she’d rewarded him with a discussion or two on the nature of witchcraft.

Rincewind listens well, and he understands, that’s the thing. He understands the nature of witchcraft, at a basic level, much better than he’d ever understood wizardry. 

She’d told him about Esk, too. And now that she had, Rincewind felt that he could dimly remember seeing her around. She’d arrived upon the scene some time after he’d been kicked out, and they’d never interacted, but she’d certainly been a wizard. He'd told her about Marchesa in turn. It seemed a surprise, to her- that there was another female wizard out there. Several, Rincewind had added, thinking back on the hydrophobes. It could happen, and it could happen more than once. So, Granny Weatherwax admitted grudgingly, there was precedent. 

Rincewind suspects that it is nothing so black and white, even in his case, and in Esk's and Marchesa's. Sure, a woman can learn wizardry and a man can learn witchcraft, and this is news to many. But it feels like the sort of thing that ought not to be so divided up at all. The only reason it is that way, he’d told Magrat, is that people are afraid of what will happen if you let anyone do anything. Because, right, if a man can be a witch and a woman can be a wizard, then a person, free of imposition, can be either or neither or both, or any blend of the two. And maybe if people stopped holding them so far apart from one another, well, they wouldn’t be so different at all. 

Wild speculation, really. And not something Rincewind feels like putting to the test. 

Instead, he runs, even paced and calm of mind, and focuses on the things that running is. Ground, rising and falling, meeting his footfalls, solid, dependable, there. Breath in and out, again steady, the tingle of life in his lungs and muscles. He does a wide loop in the road, around Verence’s castle, and approaches Lancre again from the opposite side. The town is beginning to wake up- those with early business move and interact on veins of life all their own. Several greet Rincewind on his way, recognizing him as that new lad who hangs around Granny Weatherwax for some reason. He waves back at them, for the simple joy of it, because he can. Slowing to an amble and then to a walk as he nears the porch of his rented room, he thinks, a cold drink. That’s what I’d like now, a cold drink. Something with a cherry in. 

It’s easy enough to arrange. 

So life remains complicated. There are chores to be done, rooms to be cleaned and bees to be kept and confusing dichotomies to be wondered at. But for now there is running, and it is, at its core, very simple indeed.


End file.
